Start me up

When Al Quick graduated from USC, words like “entrepreneur” and “startup” weren’t
in his vocabulary. He had a degree in electrical engineering and job offers galore.

“Nobody at Carolina was thinking about entrepreneurship in 1968, me especially,” Quick
says. “I could have had 50 job offers, so many companies were recruiting.”

After a few years working for a federal agency in Washington, D.C., where he also
earned two graduate degrees, Quick returned to Columbia and became a plant manager
and eventually a vice president for computer systems manufacturer NCR. He retired
in the mid 1990s, a few years after AT&T bought the company, but boredom set in pretty
quickly. That’s when Quick launched the second act of his career — and the very first
start-up company to come out of USC.

Using licensed technology from NCR and technical assistance from USC engineering faculty
and students, Quick and a few business partners created a start up called Kryotech.
The company focused on cooling computer chips to make them run faster.

“I had stayed in touch with Ken Humphries (then-dean of the College of Engineering
and Computing) and knew he was trying to commercialize university research,” Quick
says. “I told him what we were trying to do and asked if we could move into the college
for a while to get started.”

The college made room for Kryotech in its 300 S. Main St. facility. Quick and his
partners hired engineering students for internships and contracted with engineering
faculty for testing and design consultation.

“We were in an ideal situation,” Quick says. “We stayed in the engineering college’s
‘incubator’ for a year, got a contract to cool IBM mainframes and later sold the company
to a large computer chip test equipment manufacturer in California."

A Moore School sophomore, Kiran Ravindra started Carbon Trim Solutions in his senior year of high school and now has five-figure monthly sales for his high-end
smartphone covers. The company employs 43 contract workers in China. “A great thing
about Columbia is that you’re a big fish in a small pond. I don’t mean that at all
in a pejorative way. It’s a great place to start a company and a lot of people at
USC and in the community have great advice to share."

Off to the races

Buoyed by the success of its first hatchling, the college and USC’s research administration
set about creating a freestanding incubator that could accommodate several start ups
at once.

At the same time, Carolina beefed up the management of its intellectual property —
invention disclosures and patents from faculty research — and began offering more
legal and logistical support for professors who wanted to commercialize their research.

Joel Stevenson, an entrepreneur with four previous start-ups of his own, was recruited
as the first incubator director and helped orchestrate a deal with the City of Columbia
that turned a former municipal building on Laurel St into the USC-Columbia Technology
Incubator.

Success soon followed. IDV, the fourth company admitted to the incubator, developed
software called SpeedTree for creating digital treescapes used in video games and
movies. Earlier this year the compnay won an Academy Award for its special effects
prowess. A company called Ometric, founded by USC chemistry professor Michael Myrick,
hit paydirt with a sensing system using proprietary optical filters.

“Everyone points to Gatorade as the ultimate homerun in terms of a university startup.
We never hit one out of the park like that, but we hit a lot of singles, doubles and
triples,” says Stevenson, who left as director in 2011 to teach entrepreneurship at
the Darla Moore School of Business. “Ometric was a triple and a half.”

For those keeping score, the university’s success in cultivating start-ups since Kryotech
was born has been notable. Fifty have graduated from the incubator, creating some
800 jobs with average salaries of $62,000. The incubator currently has 59 fledgling
companies, representing 175 jobs and 50 student internships. And every year a few
more of the incubator’s tenants strike out on their own and make room for new ventures.

The USC/Columbia Technology Incubator was selected by Inc. magazine in 2013 as one
of the nation’s top three “Incubators to Watch.” The incubator maintains a strategic
partnership with USC’s Office of Economic Engagement to cultivate entrepreneurism
and work with industry.

"We've been working hard to build entrepreneurship at all levels, including helping
students explore and develop their passion for entrepreneurship,” says Bill Kirkland,
a former startup entrepreneur and current director of the Office of Economic Engagement.
“USC is becoming one of the most approachable entrepreneurial resources in the state,
and our aim is to help startups at every level be successful."

Philippe Herndon, MBA 2009, launched Caroline Guitar Company to make electric guitar
distortion pedals got his start in the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator and Google’s
Startup Grind. The company’s first pedal model made Guitar Magazine’s Top 10 list.
“One of the things I learned at the Moore School in operations management is that
if something goes wrong and you rectify that favorably for the customer, your customer
is as loyal — if not more loyal — than if nothing had gone wrong in the first place.”

‘Thinking entrepreneurially’

Incubating companies is only part of the start-up equation. There’s a thriving entrepreneurial
vibe now among USC students — enrollment in entrepreneurship classes has doubled and
membership in the Entrepreneurship Club is at an all-time high — and the university
has built an ecosystem on campus to foster that interest.

The Kennedy Pharmacy Innovation Center and the Music Leadership Laboratory are helping
pharmacy and music students, respectively, think about their career paths and skills
in more entrepreneurial ways.

An $8 million gift earlier this year from USC alumnus and Houston Texans owner Bob
McNair — himself a serial entrepreneur — will establish a new McNair Institute for
Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise. One of eight such centers in the country, it
will offer USC students a big-picture view of American capitalism, how the nation’s
economy works and the national and global policies that affect it.

At the Darla Moore School of Business, the Faber Center for Entrepreneurship wants
to cultivate an entrepreneurial culture that extends past the boundaries of campus,
says Faber Center director Dirk Brown, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

“We do a good job with fostering startups that grow to point where they have up to
$25 million in sales, and in South Carolina, that’s great,” he says. “But those companies
then usually either stagnate or sell out. We need to build the next generation of
Millikens and Sonocos, the companies that create headquarters jobs. That’s different
than having a regional hub with an out-of-state headquarters.”

The tools that are used to help startups grow can also be used to help larger companies
grow even bigger, Brown says. And with its built-in connections to international business
through the Moore School, the Faber Center can help local startups leverage the global
landscape, find international partners, talent and new markets. “We’ve created a high-impact
consortium to help these companies get to the next level,” he says.

On campus the Faber Center recently introduced the Instigator, a resource for business
students who have ideas for start-ups but aren’t ready to compete for a spot in the
incubator.

“We encourage and promote student entrepreneurship, not necessarily with the thought
that our students will start businesses but simply to show them that there are alternatives,”
says Dean Kress, the Faber Center’s associate director. “Starting up a company from
scratch or working for yourself isn’t for everyone, but thinking entrepreneurially
is always an asset.”

On a more nuts-and-bolts level the firedUP Startup Accelerator provides venture funding
to start-ups; Google’s Startup Grind places a global spotlight on local entrepreneurs;
and Founders’ Farm presents workshops on how to compete for Small Business Innovation
Research grants.

This fall the university’s new Leadership and Service Center offered a weekend start-up
conference to teach students how to hone and pitch their ideas at events that offer
start-up funds. One such venue is the Faber Center’s Proving Ground in which students
and recent USC graduates present their business ideas in a “Shark Tank” style competition.

Mike Meyers, a 2014 Moore School graduate, won last year’s competition with Tradeversity,
his and his brother Evan’s idea for an online marketplace for students and faculty
to buy, sell and trade within a university community. Since winning the competition,
Tradeversity has moved into the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator and recently garnered
additional funding from SC Launch, a venture of the S.C. Research Authority. With
technological know-how from 52 Apps, another USC student-run company, Meyers relaunched
Tradeversity on a mobile platform and introduced it this fall on five college campuses,
including USC.

“We had no idea how to run a company — I just graduated and my brother is still in
college,” says Meyers, now the CEO of Tradeversity. “But we’ve surrounded ourselves
with mentors from USC and the community and that helps grow companies like us.”

The junior visual communications major brought her fledgling photography business
to USC from Charleston and continues to develop connections in the wedding and senior
year portrait business. “I get the two extremes — people who love getting their picture
taken and those who hate it and are doing it only to make their parents happy. I want
photography to be a side gig after I graduate college — I love advertising and want
to pursue that — but five or 10 years down the road I would like to shoot full time.”

The beat goes on

Seventeen years after helping launch Kryotech, USC’s first startup company — and nearly
50 years after graduating from Carolina — Al Quick isn’t slowing down.

After Kryotech was sold, Quick tried his hand at retirement again and still didn’t
find it to his liking. He heard about a USC chemical engineering professor, Mike Matthews,
who wanted to commercialize his research on using carbon dioxide to sterilize surfaces.
The alumnus and professor teamed up and a new company called Carbonix was born.

“We’ve focused on using super-cooled CO2 to kill allergenic proteins — dust mites — in mattresses and rugs,” Quick said. “Those
are a common trigger for childhood asthma and are the cause of a lot of medical bills
in the U.S.”

Carbonix has received two patents, a $1 million Small Business Innovation Research
grant, and it’s been selected for a commercialization assistance program. The prospects
look bright

Just another day at the office for Quick and another success story in USC’s efforts
to stoke the startup energy of its faculty, students and alumni.

Building Community

Walk to the top of the heart pine stairs of the old Columbia Supply Co. building on
Gervais Street in the Vista and you’ll discover what has to be the city’s coolest
shared work space.

SOCO's shared workspace is attracting entrepreneurs from across the city.

Billing itself as “a new place for creative professionals to come together to work
in a collaborative way,” SOCO is the brainchild of five partners*, four of them USC
grads, and it’s laser focused on building community in a co-work environment.

“We want to change the way people think of work in Columbia,” says Greg Hilton, a
2003 masters in international business studies graduate of the Moore School of Business
who has become a force in building and promoting an entrepreneurial community in the
city.

It’s been estimated that one-third of American workers consider themselves freelancers
or independent contractors. With that shift has come a new word — co-work — that describes
professionals who are mobile and work collaboratively from home or from alternative
sites.

“The recession taught people that the future is not guaranteed, that you are on your
own,” Hilton says. “ The message we’re trying to send at SOCO is all that, except
for the last part — you never have to go it alone.”

SOCO has attracted programmers, writers, illustrators, videographers, photographers,
computer code instructors and other skilled professionals. About 50 are regulars,
using the workspace from every day to once or twice a week or month. The shared space
is a regular host site for user groups, meet ups and computer coding classes.

If there is a such a thing as a typical SOCO resident, it would be KRIT, which builds
software, websites and mobile apps. The company launched early last year at USC, graduated
from the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator and were in the first cohort of firedUP.
and has made SOCO its home base. Now based at SOCO, KRIT’s partners include two newly
minted USC grads and a USC student. They met while working together at 52Inc, another
USC student startup success story.

“We’ve seen that the cities that want to grow their entrepreneurial base often start
here, with a co-work space, creating a more inclusive and progressive culture. We
need to build an environment for that,” said SOCO founding partner Giovanni DiFeterici.

SOCO’s 3,000-square-foot loft space with pine plank flooring, tall windows and scattered
work stations and furniture is nearing capacity, and the partners plan to open a second
location in the Bull Street development in the spring.

"Our vision at SOCO simple — build an incredible community of people that want to
realize their full potential,” Hilton says. “We do that by offering techies, creatives
and startups alike incredible places to work, fantastic events to connect into the
community and a host of learning opportunities to help them hone their craft. We're
building community first — everything else follows.”

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